With my songwriting attempts lately I've been trampling around different arrangements of beats and syllables, trying to get my head around the differences in matching these up to make things sound right.

The release of this blog into the wild is not a signal of my success, as much as it an admission of complete failure, coupled with an anxious need to stop staring at the same small collection of lines over and over and...

Ironically, this little poem has been sitting in my drafts for three months, and the bit that was stopping my finishing it was the inclusion of a line about it being three months since I last missed the exercise.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

You'd think this was all post-the death of conversation
stated clap-tongue and facebook-flagged for notification
seen unaided conversation kills after too many close calls
now they pretend they'd be non-stop socialites
if only the Internet didn't exist at all.

:-(

Too much of anything
is not enough of something else

:-(

and spending all your time at home
is bad for your health
:-(

we don't communicate anymorethis place has lost it's soulthese are times of such intoleranceand it was so much better back then

or some shit.< :-/

'cause as soon as I say it you all nodded along to it
>:-O

you all liked it shared it commented on it
;-)

felt it simpatico
< 3

while we're needing to believe in something better though
:-(

we all feel better that we all made it the same
:-)

everyone from my old high school turned out fat and boring and stayed right where (they are)

and they found me and didn't want to talk to me too long after they found out

(I didn't)

>:-D

...and everytime I look at mirrors for too long
I walk away with pinches all over my face
8-I

from trying to kill all the pimples
that no one else could have seen at close range.
<<
__
Every generation
finds the world on the edge of destructionand the brink of madness

Every generation
sees art and culture die a thousand deathsamid endless pain, suffering and sadnessAnd amidst all this devastation
every generation
sees weeds keep growing
and out of the cracks of our relationship status
to the rest of the planet
turning as it will keep burning,
right down to embers
try and remember
that this generation
(we didn't invent alienation)

anymore than the next will end it
and I don't think we're done in yet.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Nothing from me today, because it's been a while since I spruked Wordplay, so a little refresher maybe:

Although Wordplay closed it's doors as a monthly Melbourne thing late last year, during his overseas travels, Wordplay's creator Geoff Lemon has quietly continued to manage the Wordplay website, and we've s-l-o-w-l-y been getting through the wealth of material that was recorded for Melbourne's most lively, most successful and most entertaining poetry gig ever. Well, you can debate that title if you like, what you can't debate though, is that: the next batch of podcasts is now ready for you to download and enjoy.

This month's offering takes us back to the February 2009 gig, where TZU front man Joelistics light up the stage. A crowd favourite over the various gigs he did at Wordplay, Joelistics was one of the very best at handling the transition from rapping to rhyming acapella.

This February '09 performance also has a hilarious auto-deconstructionist freestyle at the end, where he breaks down and explains what he’s doing in the middle of actually doing it.

By now there's a huge backlog of free-to-download material in the podcasts section. There you'll also find performances from Briohny Doyle, Ben Pobjie, Meg Dunn, Sean M Whelan, Anthony O'Sullivan and Emily Zoe Baker, just to name a few.

The recordings of each artist's set have been divided into individual poems for easy download and playback, and painstakingly edited to bring out the best possible sound quality, while preserving the spontaneity and ambiance of the original live performance.

Enjoy.

Next time: Kevin Brophy

_______________________________________________

I miss Wordplay, we all do.

Even people who never went to it or knew about it before, that's how good it was. Even you reading this who probably never heard of it, miss Wordplay too, whether or not you'll admit it -deep down you know it's true.

Plus there's a shit tonne of work that goes into making these recordings audible.

Imagine the sound of the Hypno-toad from Futurama. That's what Geoff Lemon gives me to work with. Then I take it and clean it up and work so hard on it that by the time he gets it back it's sounding like a Michael Bay film. Then he calls me an idiot and tells me to take all the car noises, explosions and gunfire sounds out. Then I argue my case for a while, then I go back and do it again, and then it sounds... pretty okay. Then he pays me lots and lots of money and I go and smoke cigars lit with $50 notes and...

ah look, are you still here? Would you just go listen to the damn stuff will ya? Jeez.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

This is a poem written specifically for the Melbourne Poetry Map: Audio Graffiti project, created by Eleanor Jackson. The idea was for poets to create work specific to sites/places around the Melbourne city centre, which can then be downloaded, along with a map, from the website, to allow to take a poetry tour of Melbourne.

There's some great names on the list, (as well as mine), we're talking Ezra Bix, Maxine Clark, Steve Smart, Emily Zoe Baker and many more.

Friday, September 10, 2010

I'm reading Tropic of Capricorn but won't be getting close enough to it, while I'm here.

I eat sunshine. Gluttonous and ravenous and lustful and in every possible way obscene.

I got a big black box with all of the Sopranos on DVD in it, in a shop, in Brisbane. And you didn't.

I like having old friends. I also like having new friends. I also like old stories with new friends and new stories with old friends. I like making friends who I'll still have when I get old. I like having friends of any sort who don't make me feel old.

I talked with her for a long time and realised I had made no mention of having a girlfriend, either way... now that you mention it. Hey you brought it up.

I swear you did.

I notice the wild life up here. I try not to get noticed by it. We're in confined spaces. Together.

I believe if you say something plainly enough people will read into it. You'll be clever in the attempt. So will they. Everybody wins. Everybody.

I always know I'll end up feeling melancholy and intensely lonely when, and after, visiting art galleries. But intensity of feeling is good.

I took a friend to see the two new Evangelion films. If Star Wars was there in the moral vacuum of 70s cinema, helping kids learn right from wrong then Evangelion was there to prepare me for becoming an adult. That right there is probably the first time I've been able to properly articulate just how important it was to me. So there's no point in saying I prefer the original version, is there?

I don't think it's the big spiders fault that it's a big spider, it doesn't have any choice in the matter except to be... a really big spider. It's not on purpose.

I'm pretty sure it was eating that cockroach on purpose though. I don't know that it was the cockroach's fault it was getting eaten... I suspect it also had very little choice in the matter. No one gets eaten on purpose, unless you start mixing metaphors.

(I am not mixing metaphors).

I missed my tour buddy.

I sent him a text message about the strangely empty seat on the plane next to me. He thought I was trying to write his eulogy, prematurely. He may have had a point because it wasn't the first time.

I made witty statements like "she wouldn't have noticed if the audience wasn't there" I avoid what I would call mechanical details about how I come about these astute observations, and pretend to have thought that up, just then.

I fool... myself.

I know why they call it Bris-vegas.

I am watching 'The Mysterious Cities of Gold" while stating at my friends house. I have the biggest crush on Mendoza. This is not the first time I've had sexual feelings for a cartoon character.

I'm sorry if that makes you uncomfortable (actually, I'm lying).

I rather like making you uncomfortable.

I make pessimistic self-fulfilling prophecies. I find their inevitable eventuality... fulfilling.

I arrived with with a thirst for conversation, and a lack of self esteem so dense you'd lose a shoe in it.

I clung to them with a pathetically twenty-first century desperation as obvious as a television accent, as wide as the Asian continent, as long as a year in the same pack-straps, and as thick as the Lonely Planet guides for India, Australia and Turkey and Spain, all rolled into one. The kind of desperation you can smell in overly rehearsed casual anecdotal stories about what I've doing in Brisbane. No one wants polish, they want person.

I have nothing in stock to give them. They flee from me like cockroaches from under a suddenly up-ended bin.

I was with cockroaches earlier in the day, for real. We were close, it was quiet, dark and peaceful, my left elbow was aching into numbness, I was wet and dirty, and light by a borrowed torch.

It was beautiful.

I'm not nearly good enough to articulate it. So...

I took photographs instead.

I was in Brisbane, the whole time.

_______________________________________________

Well, back in town for the launch of Eleanor Jackson's Melbourne Map, an awesome new poetry project, on Thursday 16th, at Loop Bar. (23 Meyers Place -in the CBD)check it out: